Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table
- ISBN-10
- 0465094848
- ISBN-13
- 9780465094844
- Series
- Open Heart
- Category
- Medical
- Pages
- 304
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2017-06-20
- Publisher
- Basic Books
- Author
- Stephen Westaby
Description
In gripping prose, one of the world's leading cardiac surgeons lays bare both the wonder and the horror of a life spent a heartbeat away from death When Stephen Westaby witnessed a patient die on the table during open-heart surgery for the first time, he was struck by the quiet, determined way the surgeons walked away. As he soon understood, this detachment is a crucial survival strategy in a profession where death is only a heartbeat away. In Open Heart, Westaby reflects on over 11,000 surgeries, showing us why the procedures have never become routine and will never be. With astonishing compassion, he recounts harrowing and sometimes hopeful stories from his operating room: we meet a pulseless man who lives with an electric heart pump, an expecting mother who refuses surgery unless the doctors let her pregnancy reach full term, and a baby who gets a heart transplant-only to die once it's in place. For readers of Atul Gawande's Being Mortal and of Henry Marsh's Do No Harm, Open Heart offers a soul-baring account of a life spent in constant confrontation with death.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2023-02-18
- 418 pages
- Ebook
- Grand Canyon Press
-
- 2021-04-27
- 138 pages
- Paperback
- Notion Press
Similar books
-
Open Heart
By Elie WieselThe author, at age eighty-two, was told that he needed immediate surgery to clear his blocked arteries.
-
Open Heart, Open Mind: Practical Lessons in Loving Your Life
By Swami ChetananandaStop listening to the voice of the ego—desire, ambition, greed, selfishness—and instead open your heart, realize your interrelatedness with the world, and surrender to the stillness that exists inside you.
-
An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life
By Dalai Lama, Nicholas VreelandAn introduction to the core of Buddhism by its greatest teacher, An Open Heart is the successor to the bestselling The Art of Happiness, the Dalai Lama's clear and simple guide to finding compassion and happiness. 25 photos. (World ...
-
Open Mind, Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel
By Thomas KeatingSuppose you are conversing with someone on the seventh floor of a downtown office building with the windows wide open . There is a constant hum of traffic from the street . Obviously you cannot do anything to prevent the noise from ...
-
Open Heart, Open Mind
By Clara HughesIn 2006, when Clara Hughes stepped onto the Olympic podium in Torino, Italy, she became the first and only athlete ever to win multiple medals in both Summer and Winter Games.
-
Hope Is an Open Heart
By Lauren ThompsonPhotographs and rhythmic text explore the meaning of hope and celebrate its power, especially in difficult times.
-
The Open Heart Club: A Story about Birth and Death and Cardiac Surgery
By Gabriel BrownsteinThis absorbing and poignant book is not merely the story of one writer's flawed heart.
-
King of Hearts: The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery
By G. Wayne MillerCampbell wondered . He began experimenting , using dogs as both lung donors and patients , and by the end of the winter of 1954 to 1955 , he was almost ready to try his dog - lung technique on a human . But first he needed to determine ...
-
Open Heart
By A.B. YehoshuaOpen Heart is a psychological tour de fource about love and the nature of man's soul.
-
An Open Heart
By Harry Lee KrausDr. Jace Rawlings arrives in Kenya fleeing a crumbling life. But when his open-heart surgery patients, after hovering between life and death, warn him of people about to die, a dangerous net quickly tightens around him.